


Indigo

by dollarpound



Category: Red Dwarf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 17:36:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9335393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollarpound/pseuds/dollarpound
Summary: Lister’s second trip into The Rimmer Experience is even more harrowing than the first.  Actually a smeg of a lot more harrowing than the first





	

‘Rimmer,’ began Lister, feeling stupid and stealing himself, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘So you see, Cat, if you wear the green paisley shirt with the cavalry twill trousers you can be dignified and fashionable at the same time,’ said Rimmer.

‘I’m so sorry. I understand now. Kochanski made me see. How you sacrificed your happiness to keep me sane.’

‘So you see, Cat, if you wear the green paisley shirt with the cavalry twill trousers you can be dignified and fashionable at the same time,’ said Rimmer

‘Oh, what’s the use.’ He took a deep breath. ‘All that time I was getting in your face, invading your space, all the stuff with toe nail clippings, it must have reminded you that I had a body, that I was real, and you must have had such bravery and courage to deal with it, being trapped with me, taunting you for being a coward when... what the smeg do I know.’

‘So you see, Cat, if you wear the green paisley shirt with the cavalry twill trousers you can be dignified and fashionable at the same time,’ said Rimmer.

‘So hypocritical!’ Lister wiped a tear away with the fingerless glove of his remaining hand. ‘And saying you were weasely and cheating when you have such a sense of duty, you never chose the destiny Holly gave you, you just lived it. And what did I do – hiding in a stasis booth, trying to cheat the system, and this might not be a good time to mention it but I’ve been cheating at Mineopoly all these years, too.’ Lister’s shoulders were starting to convulse.

‘So you see, Cat, if you wear the green paisley shirt with the cavalry twill trousers you can be dignified and fashionable at the same time,’ said Rimmer.

‘Rimmer. Oh, Rimmer. And then you left to become...’ and then the tears really came, Lister’s face bunched up painfully ‘...a hero,’ he finally managed in a squeak that was high even for a Scouser. Now he was just shaking and blubbering ‘A hero not even of the Universe, but of all the Universes. You were that guy all along. That guy we all fell in love with, Ace, but you didn’t need a silly flicky wig and a silver spacesuit. You were...’ He dabbed his face with his dreads and waited for Rimmer’s pre-recorded spiel.

‘So you see, Cat, if you wear the green paisley shirt with the cavalry twill trousers you can be dignified and fashionable at the same time,’ said Rimmer.

‘...the real thing, the real hero. God, Rimmer, I know it’s not you, I know you’re just Kryten’s computer simulation of a fairground ride wax droid representation of a the software ghost of the man I once knew, but somehow, somehow... oh smeg, look I’ve just got some things I need to get off me pecks is all.’

‘So you see, Cat, if you wear the green paisley shirt with the cavalry twill trousers you can be dignified and fashionable at the same time,’ said Rimmer.

Lister was smiling gently through the tacky tearstains. ‘Oh, Rimmer, you don’t know anything about fashion... Rimmer??!’ Lister was startled, he imagined for a second a gleam in the eyes of the plasticy fakeness of the ghost train dummy. He shivered and tried to shake himself out. ‘Look, you’re the best I could think of, I couldn’t sleep, I just wanted your company, or some ersatz smegging delusion of your company, so I hit the Marijuana Gin big time and decided to go back in... to Kryten’s Rimmer Ride Thing. So here I am, I love you Rimsy.’ Fresh tears.

‘So you see, Cat, if you wear the green paisley shirt with the cavalry twill trousers you can be dignified and fashionable at the same time,’ said Rimmer.

‘Rimmer!’ cried Lister, frustratedly. Then, ‘Rimmer???’ because he thought he saw that spark again, that spark of the dead man’s life. He rubbed some tears onto his podgy protruding fingers and reached up slowly to Rimmer, rubbing his tears into the sheeny fakeness of the wax droid’s face and to his astonishment it began to break down and run, it was make up, and underneath it was... skin, hardlight hologrammatic skin, the real thing. The real...

‘Lister,’ said Rimmer. His eyes were like two limpid pools of hazel loveliness.

‘Rimmer! Rimmer! I love you Rimmer!’ gasped Lister, feeling like the entirety of his internal organs were being sucked into a black hole. It wasn’t the Marijuana Gin either because that made you feel like your skull was on fire.

‘Right,’ said Rimmer curtly. Lister was taken back. ‘And you think I don’t know anything about fashion?’

‘Wha- No, I mean, I was just smegging around.’

‘Smegging around???!’ said Rimmer his face contorting with rage.

‘Er...’ Lister was backing off slowly, the tears had dried and now he was just scared.

‘So sorry my fashion sense bothers you, let me change into something a bit more...’ and Rimmer pulled apart his shiny tunic like a superhero to reveal the kinky Frank n Furter costume his low self wore when they triplicated the ship. ‘...feathery.’

‘Oh, smeg,’ gasped Lister tripping over the fairground carriage you had to take to get here backwards.

‘And I suppose you were smegging around when you and Cat ganged up on me, spraying sand in my face and giving me the mid digit the day I found out my father died.’

‘Oh, God,’ said Lister, his heart sinking.

‘I confided in you Lister, telling you how he abused me, I thought you had my interests at heart.’

Lister was crying. ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’

‘You must have known how dangerous those psychotropic games can be for the emotionally damaged. You’re not supposed to use them when you’ve had a catastrophic loss for example. And you blamed the whole thing on me! That outland revenue inspector smashed my knuckles with that hammer.’

‘Oh, smeg, you’re right, I’m so sorry.’

‘Not. Sorry. Enough.’ And then he brandished the crackling holowhip.

‘Help! Um... mango-juice, mango-juice!’ But the safe word didn’t seem to work. ‘Kryten, help please!’ Lister was backed against the fairground carriage, Rimmer’s toned thighs towering above him. Then he remembered the other way to exit the game, he had to clap his hands together, easy. Just clap his hand... oh smeg.

‘Kryteeeeeeeeeen!’

cCO

‘Mango juice...’ said Kryten, setting a cool glass of the stuff by Kochanski who was wrapped in a towel, ‘...mango juice,’ he said setting another down by the Cat who was wrapped in a towel. ‘Now, a little music..’ Kryten popped the hatch of his plastic left pec and adjusted his nipple to Jazz FM, which for once wasn’t playing cheese fusion. Instead the sonorous tones of a Nat King Cole classic filled the main living space of the Bug.

*You ain’t been blue, no, no, no...  
You ain’t been blue, till you heard that mood indigo...*

‘Lennon, McCartney..’ continued Kryten in his fusty way as he began decanting the robot goldfish from their clear bags into the plastic washing up bowl Kochanski and Cat’s feet were submerged in ‘...Harrison, Ringo, Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, Annie, Britta, Shirley, Jeff, Abed, Troy, Pearce, Inspector and Reggie. The full set.’

*That feeling, goes stealing down to my toes...  
And I sit and sigh, go long blues...*

Kochanski and Cat, sat opposite each other with their feet interleaved in the pool of robotic goldfish, sighed as the tiny teeth began nibbling at their cuticles, and clinked glasses.

‘If you need anything, just honk...’ said Kryten, leaving a comedy carhorn on the florescent table, and bustling out.

‘You know, if this was in *my* dimension...’ began Kochanski.

‘Hey! What’s the rule?’

‘Salad cream belongs in the cupboard? Just kidding...’ Cat shook his head joke reproachfully. ‘I’m not allowed to compare things to my own dimension all the time... or attack Kryten with Salad Cream. We agreed.’

*Always get that mood indigo, since my baby said goodbye...  
In the evening when the lights are low, I’m so lonesome I could die*

‘But just out of interest, what were you going to say?’

‘A- You’ve ruined it now...’

‘You were going to say you miss *your* Dave. I know how you feel, I haven’t seen my partners since we lost the Dwarf. And I’ve got *two* lady cats, so that’s twice as bad, right?’

*Cos there’s nobody who cares about me... I’m just a fool who’s bluer than blue can be...*

‘Actually I was going to say, if this was in *my* dimension, Dave would join us for this...

‘Are you tripping? Lister having a fish pedicure? Are we talking about the same Dave Lister here?’

There was a pause and Kochanski tilted her head and moved her eyes in the opposite direction as if searching some corner of her mind and then raising her thin eyebrow sardonically said ‘No, we’re precisely *not* talking about the same Dave Lister, we’re talking about the Dave from *my dimension*.’

‘But how can you be, that’s against the rules...’

*Once I get that mood indigo, I could lay me down and die.’

cCO

Lister sat up with a start. He had been hunched over the dream recorder for what felt like a million years due to that strange temporal dilation dreams seemed to incur. Because of the intensity of meaning they accreted I guess. The dream was harrowing – really the most intense emotional conflict of his entire life. As if his entire life had been boiled down to this one ultimate emotional knot. But that’s not why Lister was startled. He was startled by what wasn’t in the dream. The one thing he was looking for was this kind of tag. At the end of the dream he was expecting to see this other-worldly vision. Other-worldy visions were quite common in Dave’s life, like spilling soup on your long-johns common, but this other-worldly vision was somehow *another*otherworldy. Out-of-focus rainbow coloured sparkly clouds parted revealing the English journalist Julie Burchill dressed as the Good-Witch that somehow Lister just knew she was the Good Witch the way you do in dreams. This meant a bright pink dress and tiara and magic wand. And she says ‘If you are truly wild at heart you’ll fight for you dreams... don’t turn away from love, Sailor... don’t turn away from love... don’t turn away from love...’

He pressed the eject button on the dream recorder and an inch thick yellow plastic equilateral triangle peeped out. He pulled the triangular video from the deck and it flapped shut. It hadn’t run out of tape. Could he have *dreamt* that he dreamt it? It make smeg all sense. Was he space crazy? Well, yes, but this was crazy space crazy. The same tag happened when he was knocked out with the Epideme virus and had this weird out of body hallucination thing. Not that there was anything weird about things being weird in an out of body hallucination caused by a sentient virus with the personality of a gameshow host but this wasn’t just weird it was otherweirdly. And then he saw the journalist Julie Burchill again in this beatific pinkly vision. He inserted the equilaterally triangular video cassette into the dream recorder console and hit remind.

Lister took two quick deep vape hits from a curry cigarette and stared out into the lonesome void. The window had been polished to death and then reincarnated as itself and been polished to death again it was so polished. He pressed his nose against the thick glass that seemed to slightly vibrate with the tension of holding apart these two worlds. So fragile seemed this transparent division between earth style gravity and atmosphere and seemingly infinite nothingosity that he felt himself suddenly adrift, disorientated, at one with the stars. He was viciously hung over but the headache had gone, he had that pretty much as soon as he started drinking the stuff. Instead he just felt disturbingly floaty. It didn’t help that it turned out all along he was now dreaming that he had these dreams about the Good-Witch played by Julie Burchill. No that didn’t make sense. Wait, what did it mean if you remembered dreaming something and the dream recorder didn’t remember it?

Years ago Dave had a form of virus whose symptoms were mainly flu-like but also included physical hallucinations which personified aspects of Lister’s personality. When he was recovering from his amputation operation, and, he thought, the Epideme virus, he had an out-of-body experience where he saw Kochanski being interviewed in a late night chat setting by his Confidence. His confidence had aged a great deal and grown sexier a great deal since the disease and this twinkly charisma had led the audience of skutters to some machinic death orgasm that threatened to engulf the crew with molten skuttercum. Like you do. But then Confidence turned out to be a mask for Epideme, he still had the virus. As he was recovering from this odd apparition, the Good Witch Julie Burchill came to him. When he checked the dream recorder the next day, the dream was there, but the Good Witch wasn’t.

Lister had been masturbating with his left hand, seeing as it was the only one available, and somehow because it wasn’t his dominant side, his active side, had the strange feeling that it was someone else, that someone else was wanking him off. And, given all the strange dreams he’d been having about Rimmer recently, and the Good Witch’s injunction not to ‘turn away from love’, the obvious person that someone else could or should be was Rimmer. Lister started to regret how he’d always treated Rimmer like smeg. It was only in the process of losing Rimmer, when Lister had enabled him to become someone better with a fiction –the idea of a knight escaping from an AR machine, as if that was possible- that Lister had learnt what a true shining knight Rimmer was. Maybe if he hadn’t been so busy dissing him all the time Rimmer wouldn’t have been such a smeghead. It was a self fulfilling prophesy, we’re helping the people around us be the people they are all the time. Before he could use his old friend as wank candy however, he had to settle the score, that’s when he had the drunken idea of going into The Rimmer Experience again, but he must have passed out and dreamt it instead.

Music wafting down the corridor, as Kryten entered the midsection to top-up Cat and Kochanski’s mango juices, snapped Lister out of his maudlin reverie.

*Once I get that mood indigo, I could lay me down and die...*

Lister stared out longingly into the lonely cosmos and burst into floods of tears

cCO

‘It’s because he’s a homophobe,’ said Kochanski, proffering her glass for a refill as Cat licked her shoulder blades with long relaxing tongue strokes.

‘A homowhat?’ said that cat

‘He’s a homophobe, I found out when we were trapped in the ducts. That’s why he doesn’t like being pampered. It’s a kind of super old fashioned Northern working class male-identity thing that was resurgent with the whole conservative counter reformation of the 22nd century.’

‘I got you, Officer BB, he’s a homophobe, like when we were in the ducts. Do me...’ he said offering his muscular back for a tongue massage.

‘Can I use my hands instead?’

‘Sure thing, but use this!’ Cat produced a jar of Shea Butter. ‘There’s just one thing I don’t understand, what has pampering got to do with fear of confined spaces?’

‘So you miss your lady cats on Z deck?’ said Kochanski, trying to keep the conversation making some kind of sense, which with the Cat wasn’t often easy.

‘You bet your bottom dollarpound I do. There’s no Z deck on this rusty wreck. No A through Y now you come to mention it... As a matter of fact the crampedness is starting to make me feel homophobic...’

In her own dimension, the crew had whistle-blown this shaggy cat story long ago, preferring him not to have any shame or secrecy over his virginity and clearing the way for his purely sexual relationship with Lister. ‘What about that Julie Burchill woman, what did she want with you?’

‘Oh, she’s *crazy*, had this whole theory she called Petriarchy, how pets had been using humans all along and were destined to colonise the Universe, that we were superior to humans and had travelled back in time, back to Egypt, hence the Sphynx, and triggered off human civilisation in our own image.’

‘What’s so crazy about that?’ asked Kochanski, who reflecting on his solipsistic real talk in the ducts had come up with her own theory based on the construction of the modern ego being linked to the idealism of Bishop Berkeley which closely resembled Cat’s personal philosophy.

‘Nothing, it’s just who cares is all. Is it cos of the mining?’

‘What?’

Cat sighed patiently. ‘Long ago, before bazookoids and decent machines were invented, people in the North of England would have to work in cramped conditions underground, mining coal,’ he explained pet-ronisingly. ‘Is that why he’s so homophobic?’

‘Er, that’s not what that means.’

‘Got it!’ said Cat clicking his fingers. ‘The coal dust on the miner’s faces made him hate having facials and that’s why he doesn’t like beauty treatments!’ Only the goldfish were biting. Then he went on casually: ‘Your theory’s too high brow for me Officer BB, I don’t get this homophobica thing, always seemed to me Lister was abandoned under a pool table as a baby and has issues with care, he’s showing that he’s not cared for enough, that’s what all the poor hygiene and taped together clothing is about.’ Kochanski was completely stunned, what was she wasting her time reading that smeggy psych manual and Empiricist philosophy for when she had Cat. Just then a sorry excuse for Lister walked in. He was legless now as well as armless.

‘Dave!’ exclaimed Kochanski.

‘Hey, man, what happened to you? You look even worse I can tell.’

‘It’s all right man I’m just a bit smegged-up, I had a nightmare... it’s weird not having an arm. Kryten’s already sorted me out with everything I need. Don’t mind me.’

‘Don’t give me that don’t mind me,’ said Kochanski, and the two of them hugged him tight. Taken aback, he sat on the carhorn on the table and Kryten came rushing in.

‘Oh, group hug mode,’ he said joining in.

‘I just felt so bad about Rimmer, how he sacrificed his happiness to keep me sane,’ Lister drunkenly attempted to explain.

‘But you set up the enabling fiction that made him a hero. And you fixed the robot goldfish. You’re our hero. And... don’t be so insane then, because that’s worse.’ Lister chuckled at Kochanski’s kind words. But they could still tell he was beating himself up badly so they did something really strange. Kochanski lifted the plastic tub of water and fish onto the table and pulling down the top half of his boiler suit and longjohns and finally unwinding the bandages from the freshly healed stump his right arm had been whittled down to – dunked it in the washing up bowl. All three then began rubbing him with Shea butter as this strange slightly painful sensation invigorated him, got the blood rushing round his body as they squeezed his warm body tight and his stump tingled with a myriad fishy kisses of love and affection.

**Author's Note:**

> Lyrics by Irving Mills from Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard's Mood Indigo, Good Witch's dialogue from the movie Wild at Heart


End file.
